Missed the Internets 50 year anneversery :(

As important as the internet is to nearly everyone in today's life, we seem to have missed its 50 year anniversary!

The internet is over 50 years old, it started in the 50's or 60's as the DARPA network that was the main link between missile silos in the United States, and somewhere around the time of April 7th 1969 it was somewhat public and renamed the ARPA Network under "RFC 1". At this time it was mainly used at the College/University level for time-sharing projects involving number crunching.

Some users, fortunate enough to have a PC and a Modem, called another system to access other computers and download files. Some of the most popular dial up systems ran RiBBS, UUCP, B Protocol (by Compuserve), KA9Q (Early TCP/IP) . The internet went mainstream public in 1992 by Prodigy, America On Line (AOL), CompuServe and others.

The software running these systems was largely opensource or public domain by their authors who published their software for download on those systems.

Here is an excerpt from Compuserves B Protocol sources:

B Protocol C Library Routines   (PRELIMINARY)                   Page 2
FILE TRANSFERS                                               08 Mar 88


2.0  FILE TRANSFERS

2.1  Introduction

File transfers are generally initiated from the host via some sort  of
inquiry sequence.  The routines provided in BPPACKET and BPSLAVE allow
you to perform file transfers  by  providing  the  protocol  interface
between  your  remote  IO and your file IO.  BPPACKET provides for the
handling of a response to a  remote  inquiry  (ASCII  ENQ  character.)
BPSLAVE  provides  the handling for the actual file transfer.  Through
calls to your facilities,  BPSLAVE  and  BPPACKET  provide  continuous
status  information  to  your  application  interface.   File transfer
options are set-up and chosen automatically via the B Plus negotiation
packet.

For the sake of history of the internet, should I place my 4GB+ of ancient dinosaur archive online? Much has been placed in the Public Domain or GPL'd as noted in the sources! This data includes games, networking, hosting, along with several interfacing projects with electronics.

Of the projects in my archive the following single file program, my favorite one, unmodified is "almanac.c", included as an attachment, that can be slightly modified as a Windows Console application. I can get it running without bugs but it runs and needs to be updated with current astronomical almanac data.

Should I upload everything listed as public domain and/or GPL'd? I will need alot of feedback to motivate me to dive into and check all the files, it's alot of work!

almanac.c (32.4 KB)

it started in the 50's or 60's as the DARPA network that was the main link between missile silos in the United States

I am pretty sure that's nonsense. The ARPANet was very much a research project in the late 1960s. There was a rumor that one of the PURPOSES of that research was to allow reliable military and command communications even if parts of the countries had been blown away, but I think that's been denied by the early researchers.

and somewhere around the time of April 7th 1969 it was somewhat public and renamed the ARPA Network under "RFC 1".

Um. For very STRICT definitions of "somewhat public." It was an ARPA (DARPA, later) funded research project. You got on the ARPANet by doing ARPA-funded research. ARPA funded quite a lot of research in those days (including Timesharing, and the invention of the Mouse.) You'd need a relatively substantial contract - the IMPs used to connect things ran about $250k each.

At this time it was mainly used at the College/University level for time-sharing projects involving number crunching.

In the early days, it was mostly networking and computer research. Your university had to have a DARPA contract to play. Major contractors (BBN and SRI, for example) also played. Later, contracts relatively unrelated to networking itself apparently qualified. For example, Wharton Business School had a connection circa 1976 (my first computer-reated job was there!); I was told they were doing econometric modeling using data that was convenient to transmit via ARPANet, or something like that.
You may be thinking of NSFNet, which came much later (1981) and was largely designed to give wider access to SuperComputer resources around the country. (starting with: you only need a government contract, not necessarily Defense...)

Some users, fortunate enough to have a PC and a Modem, called another system to access other computers and download files. Some of the most popular dial up systems ran RiBBS, UUCP, B Protocol (by Compuserve), KA9Q (Early TCP/IP).

You left out X/Y/ZModem and Kermit.

The internet went mainstream public in 1992 by Prodigy, America On Line (AOL), CompuServe and others.

None of those were Internet based, to start with.
I generally count the beginning of Consumer Internet as being concurrent with Microsoft shipping Windows95. That was the first time that a consumer OS included IP networking code that you didn't have to acquired separately and install (usually at considerable effort and significant cost.)
And there were a lot of non-internet protocols competing with it - DECNet and SNA, ARCNet, Banyan, Novell, Appletalk, XNS, ChaosNet, X.25, OSI, PUP... (I've got the T-Shirt!)

For the sake of history of the internet, should I place my 4GB+ of ancient dinosaur archive online?

Would that be the famous SIMTEL20 collection?
At some point during the ARPANet/MILNet split (~1983) the US Army decided that they were using a lot of these "personal computers", and were using an awful lot of CP/M and MSDOS software (called ShareWare or FreeWare back then - pre "Open Source") Rather than have each user use BBS or send for floppies to be delivered by mail or whatever, they set up a mainframe at White Sands Missile Range where they could store all of this "publicly transferable" software in a single, ARPANet/MilNet-accessable place. They were delightfully inefficient about sorting out stuff of actual "real" use, and just uploaded all of the individual floppies, complete...
Later, this would be available as a CDROM. (A couple of CDRoms?) (I guess it doesn't come close to 4G, though. Things were smaller in those days.)
Since the stuff you're talking about WAS on the net, it's probably STILL on the net (although there are some famous mailing-lists that weren't permanently archived, or the archives weren't backed up, or the backups were lost. (disk space was expensive in those days.) If you've got archives of the "human-nets" mailing list from ~1978 through 1990, I think a bunch of people would be interested.)

I didn't have any trouble finding this, for instance :

Date: 15 May 1981 (Friday) 1816-EDT
From: WESTFW at WHARTON-10 (William Westfield)
To: dan at MIT-ML
cc: info-cpm at MIT-MC
Subject: MODEM for TOPS-10

There is now a simple minded version of the MODEM program that will
download programs from a site runnning TOPS-10. It will only handle
text type files, and transferrs are only one way, but it should help
some of you.

Source code on WHARTON-10 in MODEM.MAC[4000,42] FTPable without
logining in.
Comments and suggestions should be sent to BillW@SRI-KL

Enjoy
BILLW